BEST behaviour, and not...

I went into Peter Jones last Tuesday in my lunch hour, and stumbled, swiping my John Lewis card on the way down. The main purchase was a whole bag of Rowan's Felted Tweed at half price, in a colour which matches at least two of my skirts (I also picked up five balls of Scottish Tweed 4-ply to add to the Donegal/Scottish Tweed stash box - they're the sort of bright colours which liven up otherwise dull colourways). 1750m/1910 yds of tweedy niceness.

I love Felted Tweed, and have made a couple of scarves for my Dad from it, but at £5.50 a ball it's a little bit above my price range for garments, unless it's in a sale. (I'm not saying this is an unreasonable price, just that I'm a cheapskate generally when it comes to clothes, as those who've trawled charity shops with me will attest. One of the skirts this cardigan matches was a cast-off from my mother - who has very nice taste in clothes but bought too large a size - and the other was a charity shop find for the princely sum of £2.75, which is the cost of one ball of this yarn even on sale...)

Anyway; Felted Tweed is a fine-ish DK, nearer to a US sportweight, and has fabulous metreage, and I realised I have just the pattern for it, Véronik Avery's Nordique Swing from the Fall edition of Interweave Knits. As the name of the pattern implies, it's meant to be knitted in Avery's new yarn, Nordique, which seems to be a sportweight, but as Classic Elite who distribute the yarn don't sell outside North America and have no plans to, I thought I'd wait until a likely substitute yarn came along. I was thinking about the lovely Jaeger Trinity, but I have plans for that already...

Anyway; the best behaviour thing was - look!! I swatched!! (And then I felt very bad about myself. Not, you understand, for the action of swatching - but because actually what I was doing was knitting a tension square; we have a perfectly good phrase for this process in British English... in the same way as, thank you Google Chrome spellcheck, "colourway" is an actual word. Having said that, the spellcheck fails to recognise "Google", "spellcheck" or "swatching" as words either... Anyone know how to turn it off?)


Anyway, I knitted a square, and measured it, and washed and dried and blocked it, and patted myself on the head, and measured it again - and there was absolutely no difference. I did not get gauge because I'd given myself a talking to by then. Sadly I also did not achieve the appropriate tension, as UK knitting patterns used to have it. The tension demanded by the pattern is 24 sts and 32 rows to 4"/10cm. I got 21.5 sts and 34 rows to 4". But look, isn't it a pretty thing? And the fabric feels very nice and wearable. This sample is also done on a 3.25mm (US3) needle - I am not going to be knitting an entire garment for someone with my degree of, let's say, décolletage, on a 2.75mm needle... and anyway, then the row tension would be even more off and it might feel like wearing armour-plating...



I shall, nevertheless, be knitting Nordique Swing - having done the maths, the one three sizes down works with the number of stitches I need; with any luck that means I'll save a bit of yarn and have enough to work the sleeves till they're bracelet-length...

NB: Reading it back, this post sounds like an anti-American rant. For which, apologies - this was not my intention at all.

But my job is language (not grammar, by the way; I know my grammar's pretty awful when I'm not watching it like a hawk), and the beauty and variety of language, and being able to cope with how that language is used by actual human beings day-to-day. In my day job I take care that if someone types Roadside bombs or IEDs into our database to find information on what we've decided to call Improvised explosive devices, I've done as much second-guessing as I can so they still find what they need without even realising we've done something clever behind the scenes to help them; in my not-day-job I like the principle that you could have a US knitting thesaurus with Tension, see Gauge in it, and a British one with Gauge, see Tension; it's just nice to keep using both regional variations and everyone being aware of all of it because that's just interesting! Or indeed, all regional variations, if you think of British DK, and Australian 8-ply and US light worsted... And you could have entries for sport (French) and sportweight (US) which would alert you to the fact that the first is somewhere between a DK/8-ply/worsted/light worsted and an Aran/worsted/heavy worsted, and the second somewhere between a DK and a 4-ply/sock/fingering weight...

Hmmnnn. A Universal Knitting Thesaurus. Now that would be fun. And actually, I suspect that those wonderful people over at Ravelry have already done an awful lot of the work - they've sorted out most of the yarn weights, for instance, and you can enter either "tea cosy" or "tea cozy" into a search and get exactly the same results in the same order; which made me inordinately, geekishly happy a couple of weeks before Christmas when I was looking for just such an item...